Pages

Monday, January 13, 2014

Another
option for surf-boat buyers at an affordable price is the Moomba Flow
Surf System, the first manual surf system on the market. We wanted to
learn more so we contacted Moomba Product Manager Matt Brown who is
responsible for leading the team that develops all the Moomba products.
We were happy to find out that Matt has been wakesurfing for years; you
can even see him in action in the movie "Scrubs of the South" riding an
eight-foot foam surfboard back before most people had even heard of
wakesurfing.

So Matt, why did Moomba create its surf system design?Moomba
created the Flow surf system because we saw a demand from the market
for something that would allow us to quickly go from wakeboarding to
wakesurfing, without filling and draining bags or adding a ton of extra
weight to one side only. While we understand that some consumers in the
market are “hardcore” surfers and they may want to add thousands of
pounds to one side only to get a perfectly shaped wake, we felt the
majority of our buyers like to do all wake sports and we wanted to make
something that was quick and easy to use, had great performance, that
was extremely reliable, yet still reasonably priced. We know it may not
be the perfect system for every buyer, but we felt like we needed
something that had broad appeal that wasn’t complicated to use or had to
be perfectly positioned to work properly.

What exactly is the design and how does it differ from other designs on the market?The
design is fairly simple. We did a lot of testing and developed a
rotating plate that deploys on the transom corners and allows the
opposite side wake to shape according to the position of the plate.
There are several differences in our design and the others. The first
is our design is the first manual surf system. All the others are
actuated with an electric or hydraulic ram. While there are several
great systems out there, we didn’t want to add the cost of the
electronics or actuators to control our system. Plus, without
electronics, that makes the system more reliable and actually easier to
use. Some companies controls are quite complicated, and if not used
properly, can actually hurt the performance of the system. Another
difference is our system is adjustable and can be adjusted according to
how you want to weight your boat. If you want to just use factory
ballast and a few people, then the first location is probably the best.
However, if you want to slightly offset your weight or add more rear
ballast, then you can shape the wake slightly different or lengthen the
wake by using the second or third location. We feel like this gives us
even more broad appeal because we know all of our consumers use their
boats differently.

What is the engineering process behind the design?As
to the engineering process behind the design, I am not going to lie and
say that we did a bunch of CAD development or flow analysis to come up
with the perfect design. It, like I assume most other systems out
there, was mainly a trial and error process. We have known for years
that wakesurfing was going to change some of our designs. We actually
have been working on Surf systems for several years, but getting the
right “Moomba” solution took us a little longer, but we think it was
worth the wait.

It
looks like your surf system design in the first manual one on the
market, so what is the benefit of having a manual surf design?I
would say there are 3 main benefits of having a manual surf design.
One is lower cost. The second is reliability because you are not having
to deal with electronics that can go bad with time. And third is ease
of use. Since you manually have to move it, you know exactly what the
system is doing and where it is. Some can say that electronic actuated
systems are also easy to use, but if you are not familiar with the
system or dash components, electronic systems can be complicated to know
exactly what is deployed or working or what side is doing what. With
our system, anyone can drive without having to fear that the driver
might “screw up” the wake by the surf system controls.

How about the surf performance with the new design?Honestly,
everyone claims their surf performance is the best and obviously we are
very excited about our performance. But what we recommend is to go
check out a local dealer and demo it for yourself. We feel like with
the Flow system, you can easily create a good clean surfable wake by
just filling all factory ballast and deploying the opposite side plate
to the second position. However, the system doesn’t stop there. If you
spend a little time with it, you will find that you can tweak the wake
to how you like it by adding weight, or slightly offsetting weight side
to side or front to back, and by trying different plate positions. In
our testing, we feel like we have one of the most flexible, easy to use
systems out there that is not overly sensitive to fine tuning
adjustments. And did I mention it is very reasonably priced?